Posted on 07/02/2023 2:55:53 PM PDT by nickcarraway
French President Emmanuel Macron favors “shifting the center of European gravity towards China,” according to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
“I do not quite understand the concept of strategic autonomy if it means de facto shooting into our own knee,” Morawiecki said Thursday. “European autonomy sounds fancy, doesn't it? But it means shifting the center of European gravity towards China and severing the ties with [the] U.S.” Morawiecki did not identify Macron by name, but the reference to the French leader’s signature “strategic autonomy” concept made the rebuke unmistakable. And it punctuated a wider denunciation of traditional powers of Western Europe, which he characterized as feckless in the face of threats from Russia and China.
“They want a quick ceasefire — armistice in Ukraine — almost at any price. Maybe not all of them, but there are politicians in Western Europe who think so ... ’Ceasefire at any at any price. The sooner the better, as quickly as possible, Ukraine. Why are you fighting so bravely?’” Morawiecki said at the Atlantic Council. “They want also [to ensure] that the selling of high-margin products to China continues. The wake-up call with regard to China is very, very soft — very weak in Europe across the European Union.”
The criticism underscored the difficulty that Macron faces in persuading Central and Eastern European countries to embrace his vision for the European Union. Macron traveled to Beijing last week, in conjunction with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for a series of meetings that U.S. and many European officials hoped would showcase Western unity in the midst of the war in Ukraine and Chinese saber-rattling around Taiwan. While Macron and von der Leyen reportedly delivered those messages behind closed doors, the French leader declared his unease about being “just America’s followers” in a potential crisis with Taiwan.
“The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron told journalists in his traveling party. “Europeans cannot resolve the crisis in Ukraine; how can we credibly say on Taiwan, ‘Watch out. If you do something wrong, we will be there’? If you really want to increase tensions, that’s the way to do it.”
That rhetoric, delivered as it was from China during a moment of high geopolitical tension, startled many trans-Atlantic observers and sent French officials scrambling to explain that Macron’s initiatives would reinforce the alliance rather than fray it. "Of course, we stand with the U.S., and let's avoid any misunderstanding,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Wednesday evening. "When you have Europe investing more in defense, it means more spending from the European citizen for their own defense and less spending for the U.S. taxpayers. So, this is good news for the U.S. to have a stronger Europe and a more independent Europe.”
Still, Macron’s comments drew an implicit contradiction from Germany. “We are currently seeing how important it is to have partners around the world who share our values at our side when we face our own security threats,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Thursday at the beginning of her own trip to China. “That is why it is so important for us because we are vulnerable as Germany and as the European Union that we cannot be indifferent to the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.”
Their divergent tones point to a debate within European capitals about the strategic cultures of the leading European Union and NATO member states — their appetites for confrontation, and their assessment of how to manage risk, with Russia and China. Baerbock has emerged as one of Berlin’s most voluble advocates of military aid for Ukraine over the last year. Yet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s relative hesitance to send tanks and other heavy weaponry to Ukraine has exposed Germany to continuous criticism from its Central-Eastern neighbors.
“You cannot protect Ukraine today and tomorrow be saying Taiwan is not your business, and you need to support Ukraine if you want Taiwan to stay as it is,” Morawiecki said. “If Ukraine gets conquered, the next day China may attack — can attack — Taiwan. I see lots of connectivity, lots of interdependencies between the situation in Ukraine and the situation in China, in Taiwan and China.”
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Polish officials have taken a central role in the connections between U.S. allies in Europe and Indo-Pacific democracies, perhaps most notably through the inking of major arms deals with South Korea. And though Warsaw is embroiled in disputes with the European Union over key parts of the Polish judiciary, which EU officials have said “no longer meets the requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law,” Morawiecki offered his own party as “the key” to coordinating U.S. and EU foreign policy.
“There are people who say that the Western economy and the Western world must give way to the Asian power, and China in particular,” he said. “The West has not yet said its last word. I believe so, at least. We have to rebuild the world order, renew NATO, and restore peace. And the new Europe's Central and Eastern Europe can be a driving force in global competition and in defending our freedom together with the United States.”
Aw Gee, that would be a shame!
BRICS takes up Europe and its over for US dollars
However, Macron has a revolution on its hands, if Europe moves in supporting China sphere, I’m fine with USA collaborating with freedom and nationalist movements in Europe.
I suspect Macron is saying that being forced into one Neocon War (Ukraine) is bad enough, but they don’t want to be forced into war (China), which is the latest Neocon ‘project’.
Vichy part deux
Why do you love some wars and cheer for them?
Who will France not surrender to?
Most Americans have short memories about France. Before DeGaulle forced USAF bases in France to close, they made American dependent women that were married to or female children of servicemen carry French ID cards that were the same ones issued to the prostitutes in that country. Their arrogance and hatred of the US began somewhere after their revolution. Even though we bailed their butts out of two wars and helped them in their loss in French Indochina, their arrogance is surprising.
Macron is under NATO, and if he wants NATO protection, then he will do as told, just as South Korea and Japan had to do when we demanded they give us their artillery rounds for disposal in Ukraine.
Sorry if my stand against World War 3 bothers you, not all conservatives are Warmongers, although I have to admit, far more than I thought, including many here, sure are.
France’s leftist media machine is no friend to France.
Radio France is a nest of communist / anarchists with profound anti-American sentiments.
On my last visit there they had a sign in the central studio that read CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM.
(I took a picture.)
The run-of-the-mill French media intellectual sees the US as a monster, Trump as a Satan figure.
The few remaining French power players with a sense of history, individual liberty, and sovereignty embrace the immortal friendship between France and the USA and lament France’s takeover by radical leftists and welfare-hungry peoples of all kinds.
I keep hope, as a francophile, that this awful wave will pass, and that we may once again cherish shared values of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,
the values Lafayette and Washington loved to discuss, and which helped our nations fulfill their natural destinies.
US pulls out of NATO, closes all bases and brings troops home. Spill your own blood and pay for your own defense Europe.
What did Europe ever do for America?
The headline makes this sound more drastic than it is.
There’s a feeling in Europe that Biden has been pushing the Russia policy too far and that Europe ought to teach the US government a lesson.
For once, Europe isn’t entirely wrong.
Some clever wag once wrote that France has lost every war in which it participated, including the French Revolution, in which it lost to itself.
Not much recently, I am in favor of revolutions in Europe if they are against pro-communist and anti-USA governments though.
Apparently, Macron has never looked at a world map!
Even in this jet enabled, internet enlightened times geography matters.
Hardly. France had the same problem Germany had. They pushed their wars so far that eventually they had everybody else against them. They wouldn’t have been able to do so if they hadn’t been powerful and been able to win a lot of battles and wars along the way.
The war started in 2013, when the USA and Brussels supported a CIA-trained nationalist/nazi coup in the Maidan, who overthrew an elected President, who was committed to keeping Ukraine whole and multi-ethnic.
Remember when John McCain and Victoria were on stage cheering the Right Sektor/Svoboda violent take-over of government buildings?
But you already knew that.
Yep. After they got rid of as many royals and aristocrats they could find, they ended up turning on the very same people who helped them start the Revolution.
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